Pretty young heiress Dorothy Arnold vanished into thin air
from Fifth Avenue and 27th Street, one of the busiest street corners in the
world. Hundreds of people surrounded her on that bleak winter morning and yet
no one saw anything. She simply disappeared without a trace -- never to be
heard from again.

On the cold morning of December 12, 1910, Dorothy left her parent’s home in Manhattan to go shopping for a
dress to wear to her younger sister’s “coming out” party. It was the holiday
season in New York and a time for festivities, galas and balls and this
particular party was a much-anticipated one for the Dorothy, a young and
beautiful graduate of Bryn Mawr and the daughter of a prosperous and socially
prominent clan.

As she left the house that morning, several acquaintances
stopped and spoke with her as she walked west along Fifth Avenue and others
saw her going toward a bookstore on 27th Street. They all said that she seemed
cheerful. A clerk who sold Dorothy a box of chocolates at Park and Tilford's
said that she was very carefree and friends who ran into her outside of the
bookstore said that they noticed nothing unusual about her. Strangely though,
these acquaintances would be the last people to ever see the girl who came to
be known as the “vanishing heiress” alive.

When se failed to return to 79th Street for dinner that
night, her family telephoned friends but she had not been seen by any of them.
People of high social position like the Arnolds never called the police or
informed the newspapers of their troubles. The decided to keep Dorothy's
disappearance a secret, conducting discreet investigations through a friend of the family and
with the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Her parents spent thousands with the
Pinkerton’s but they had no more success than John S. Keith, the family friend
did. Keith was the attorney for the family and he had often escorted Dorothy
to social functions, so her took her disappearance especially hard. For weeks,
he searched hospitals, morgues and jails in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
He inspected patients, inmates and corpses before finally giving up in
despair.

The secret investigations continued for six agonizing weeks, before
the Arnold’s finally turned to the police and the newspapers. Her father,
Francis Arnold, summoned reporters to his office and announced his belief that
Dorothy had been “attacked in Central Park” on her way home and that her body
had been thrown into the reservoir. As grim and hopeless as this sounds, the
rigid and proper Arnold would rather his daughter be dead than the alternative
-- that she had run away with a man with whom she had spent a clandestine week
several months before. Arnold refused to give out any information about the
man so the newspaper reporters tracked him down on their own.

The man’s name was George Griscom, Jr. but he denied any knowledge of Dorothy’s
whereabouts. Griscom was a tubby, 40 year-old who lived quietly with his
parents on Philadelphia's Main Line. The newspapers soon learned that he
had been involved with Dorothy and that the summer before, she had done
something that society girls in those days simply did not do. After
telling her family that she was going to Boston to visit a Bryn Mawr
classmate, she met Griscom instead. The two stayed at separate Boston
hotels but at the end of the week, money ran out and so Dorothy pawned
some jewels, signing her real name to the pawn shop record. It was this
pawnbroker who had tipped off the press to her Boston visit.

By the time of Dorothy's disappearance,
Griscom was in Naples with his parents and sent word by cable that he had
no idea where Dorothy could be. At a January 22 news conference, Mr.
Arnold stated that his wife, a semi-invalid, had gone to New Jersey to
escape from the pressures of the search. However, the woman and her son,
John, soon turned up in Italy instead, where they sought out Griscom. John was so suspicious of the rich bachelor that he
throttled him and threatened to kill him if he didn’t reveal where Dorothy was
hiding.

George Griscom Jr.,
Dorothy's half-hearted suitor, preferred bachelorhood to matrimony but he
was struck by her disappearance & publicly spent thousands of dollars
searching for her.

Griscom insisted that he had nothing to do with her disappearance but
he did turn over a letter that she had recently written to him concerning her
depression over a story she had written that had been rejected by a magazine.
She concluded the letter with “All that I can see ahead is a long road with no
turning.” Griscom feared that she had been so distraught over this that she
had taken her own life. Or so he said. A few friends believed that if Dorothy
had committed suicide, she had done so because Griscom refused to marry her.

Meanwhile, back in the states, theories were being floated
as to what might have happened to the young woman. Some thought that perhaps
Dorothy was in a hospital somewhere, suffering from amnesia. It was thought
that perhaps she had slipped an icy sidewalk that chilling morning and had
fallen, striking her head on the pavement. A check of the hospitals in
Manhattan revealed no one matching her description though. Others suggested
that she might have been pregnant and had died on the abortionist's table. The
most durable rumor was that she had become pregnant and had been banished by
the family to Switzerland in disgrace. The search for her had been merely an
elaborate ruse to save the Arnold's from the shame. However, as a New York
society girl, Dorothy knew many people who would travel to Switzerland and
might recognize her. But she was never seen there -- or anywhere else for that
matter.

As the publicity began to spread, reports of “Dorothy
sightings” began coming in from all over the country. She was “recognized” in
hundreds of cities but all of the reports turned out to be false. Francis
Arnold spent more than $100,000 trying to recover his daughter, but it all
amounted to nothing. He died in 1922 and his wife passed on in 1928, never
knowing what became of the young woman. In Arnold’s will though, a provision
stated that he had left nothing for Dorothy “for I am satisfied that she is
not alive.”

George Griscom later returned home and he also continued to search, spending huge
amounts of money on “Come Home Dorothy” ads in major newspapers. But could
this have been an act to throw off a trail that may have led to his own door?
Six years after the girl had disappeared, a Rhode Island convict released a
story to the press that claimed he had been paid $150 to dig a grave for the
murdered heiress. The description that he gave of the man who paid him was
strikingly close to that of Griscom, however he never learned the man’s name.
The convict stated that Dorothy had died after a botched abortion and that she
had been buried in the cellar of a house near West Point. Police unearthed
cellars all over the area but they found no sign of a corpse.